June 2013
6 posts
GARBAGE PLATE
Tomorrow I’ll be in Rochester, NY, to read poems for the Deep Fried Poetry Series w/ Jess Grover, Nate Pritts, and Tricia Asklar.
Earlier today I asked Facebook ‘what should I do in Rochester’ and more than one person answered ‘garbage plate.’ I googled ‘garbage plate’ and discovered that it’s a Rochester famous dish, Wikipedia say the Garbage Plate (it just seems like it should be capitalized) is:
“a combination of two selections of cheeseburger, hamburger, red hots, white hots,Italian sausage, chicken tender, fish (haddock), fried ham, grilled cheese, or eggs; and two sides of either home fries, French fries, baked beans, or macaroni salad. On top of that are the options of mustard and onions, and Nick’s proprietary hot sauce, a sauce with spices and slowly simmered ground beef. It’s served with rolls or Italian toast on the side, fresh from the bakery next door.”
Also:
“Health.com named the Garbage Plate the fattiest food in the state of New York.”
The Garbage Plate is pictured above. I have been thinking about it all day. I looked at at least 20+ different photos of this thing before I went to work. I feel interested in the phenomena where people (included: self) are compelled by a thing primarily because of its impossibility and perhaps total uselessness. I am not saying it does not taste really good, but, the novelty (and charm? CHARM, yes?) of the thing seems to be that it is so unnecessary yet confronts us with its existence.
I don’t really want to eat one tomorrow but I AM going to find one to look at.
If you live around Rochester, come to The Yards tomorrow at 7 pm. We can talk about this.
from Panic Chorus →
thefiddleback.com
Thank you to The Fiddleback for publishing some pieces from a very long poem I wrote called PANIC CHORUS in their June issue. The poem is a lot for Peter Gizzi. Click to read its parts.
May 2013
4 posts
what is so remarkable about my new apartment at the end of a cul-de-sac is the total silence after ~9pm. occasionally, crickets.
Crowdsource Request:
I’m writing something on Rosmarie Waldrop, can you help? Can you link me to essays/writings on her poetics, with BONUS if specifically on CURVES TO THE APPLE? Need not be “full-on scholarly,” semi-scholarly preferred.
In short: what are some essays on Waldrop that helped you learn something?
April 2013
9 posts
Gulf Coast 25.1 Featuring: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Mary Biddinger, Eula Biss, Amy Boesky, Laynie Browne, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Kent Dorn, Norman Dubie, Thomas Hesie, Drew Johnson, Joshua Kryah, Low Kwa Mei-En, Dr. Lakra, Sarah Manguso, Clancy Martin →
gulfcoastmag.org
Gulf Coast is a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts published by the University of Houston in Houston, Texas.
Happy to be in this really good great new GULF COAST w/ people like Joshua Young, Eula Biss, Traci Brimhall, Ada Limon, Danniel Schoonebeek + many others
I WANT TO MAIL YOU THINGS
Ever since I posted about mailing special things to people who purchase my book this month from SPD, so many of you have! Thank you!
I want to send you your things but I don’t have yr addresses! So, if you purchased YOU ARE NOT DEAD this month, and would like a surprise-poetry-thing from me, please email extrahumanarchitecture@gmail.com with your mailing address!
Then I will make you something special and send it.
Then I will feel even happier than I already do.
There are still 10 days left in April and 19 copies of YOU ARE NOT DEAD left at SPD if you’d like one!
A NEW THING
is that for the rest of this month, poetry month after all, if you order a copy of YOU ARE NOT DEAD from Small Press Distribution, I will send you something in the mail. It will be something you like, hopefully. They will all be different things but may relate (and are not limited) to:
poetry
the weather
book arts
strategies for combating loneliness
other people
historical photographs
human connection
colors
When you order a copy, send me an email to extrahumanarchitecture@gmail.com with your address. Or hit forward on the convenient receipt SPD will send you, because then you have to type less.
If we know each other I will be delighted to send you the thing I will send. If we don’t, I will be even happier.
It will be a surprise what I send to both you and to me. The surprise will be our very own special shared thing.
“Everyone’s worried about the apocalypse, but not everyone has a sweet, best friend who insists the apocalypse is nothing to worry about. In Wendy Xu’s debut collection, You Are Not Dead, there are a plenty of everyday things to fear—moving to a new city only to forget old friends, dying in a house fire, the “actual untelevised apocalypse”—but “nothing is actually wrong with us ever,” the speaker insists, though she takes “a quiet kind / of panic to the river” (10, 60, 7). You will be charmed by this witty, non-committal prophet who keeps on noticing, with an unusual gratitude, that meaning is not dead: “I know my hands fold / on their own. I know falling / to my knees still means something. / That a basin of cool water still answers the moon” (15). Creatures keep on living, too, and they’re wondrous—those friends who talk about craving waffles, that majestic African Prairie Buck, the tree she’s planted “knowing / it’s fine without me” (18, 8, 25). You Are Not Dead tells us it’s okay to surrender our need for control, proposing that “one way to be amazed is to be / less amazing and then pay / attention” (18). Wendy Xu writes a realistic hope and humility into our every little anxious thought, illuminating the natural grace that still exists among us. What an overlooked, exceptional truth: we will one day die, but we are not dead yet.”
—
from Analicia Sotelo’s review of my first book, YOU ARE NOT DEAD, up today at LitBridge. Thank you Analicia, thank you LitBridge!
The book is available now from Small Press Distribution!
“To knock over the first domino in a domino trail is to experience a prolonged ending, but to knock over one domino at a time, to have your own finger so involved in a falling, is to stretch an anticipation out to forever, and that is exactly what this book does; the poems turn on a whim (or, more likely, a whimsy) and with each turn, you must reach out and restart the domino, the trail that isn’t actually a trail, but really a series of lilly pads that you must hop across, never knowing if the next one will give, and that maybe you will fall into all that mucky muck and be forced to recall that you are no cartoon after all.”
—B.J. Love’s one-sentence book reviews are always one sentence. One Sentence Book Review #9 is of I WAS NOT EVEN BORN, my collap chap with Nick Sturm, available here from Coconut Books. Thanks, B.J. Love.
On the first day of poetry month
Happy to be here this first day of April at DIGITAL ROOTS READING SERIES, an online place for videos of poets reading poems:
I read “Never Again the Same” by James Tate, a very important poem to me and to others, plus the first poem from YOU ARE NOT DEAD, just out from Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Thank you Jason Bradford for this new project. Count with me how many times I say “Umm” because poetry makes me nervous.
